~ Conversations on blankets, bottles, and building the kingdom.

Monthly Archives: August 2014

I just completed my first round of freezer meals, and it was great. Huge time saver. It doesn’t take twice as long to make twice as much food, and definitely not four times as long to make four times as much food. Instead of cooking an hour every day, I cooked all day one day, then enjoyed more than a month of minimal dinner preparation.

If I didn’t have a whole day, I would take a week, then make dinner each day four times. Eat one portion, freeze three. This works well for many reasons: 1.) Once you have all the ingredients and equipment out and dirty, it doesn’t take that much longer to repeat the meal a few more times. 2.) If you ruin a recipe, you won’t be stuck eating it three more times; you’ll learn from your mistakes. 3.) I don’t have the giant pots and bowls to make huge batches. Nor do I know how to make huge batches. (Apparently.)

The freezer meal literature out there stresses the value of quality freezer packaging. Save a few cents on store-brand freezer bags, lose a meal.

I chose recipes that passed through a liquid-like state at some point. Sloppy Joes, German pancake batter, casseroles in a bag, mac and cheese (next time I’ll just freeze the cheese sauce), soup, stew (raw potatoes turn nasty black in the freezer), spaghetti sauce. I also made enchiladas in a disposable pan, froze pancakes in a stack, and individually wrapped (in plastic wrap and foil) burritos (which were the best. Bryan loved to take them to work.)

Then I made a huge shopping list and went shopping ALONE. I wish I had brought my meal plan with me when I shopped; I had questions about what kind of what-what to buy, and if I had known what the what-what was for, I would have made a more informed decision.

I didn’t rock the money saving. I don’t know why. We had guests several times during the month, and I made fresh food for them (didn’t feel like feeding them the black potatoes or mush and cheese). And I got way too much tortillas, cheese and meat. So if you are just smarter about your planning than me, you should be better off.

You don’t care about the following information. Seriously. You should probably stop reading.

I’m writing this in the WordPress text editor.

I have almost finished the HTML and CSS course on Codecademy.com. I wanted a place to practice what I have learned, by making my own stuff, so this is what I set up.

I downloaded Notepad++. I write my code there, and I can apparently save it as a .html file or a .css file. Then I go into Windows Explorer, right click on my file, and say, Open With Chrome. I snap that window to the right, and snap Notepad++ to the left. I make a change in Notepad++, save the file, then refresh my browser to see the update. When I am done editing my html and css files, I save them in my My Website folder in my Public folder of my Dropbox folder. Then I right click on the file and say “Copy Public Link” which is here.

So this is a little website of pictures of my family, hosted on Dropbox, created by me, who still has a lot to learn.

Including whether this is actually a “development environment.” I’ve just heard Bryan throw that term around, and I’m assuming it’s this. He’ll probably get a chuckle out of that.

Maybe it’s not a coding environment. Maybe it’s just a workflow? Well, if it is a workflow, it’s probably a pretty primitive one, which he will also have a chuckle about.

I’m rocking it. In fact, I’m typing this post in the “text” editor instead of the “visual” editor. I’m not clicking the Bold and Italics or Link buttons and I feel awesome.

I also feel like a hacker. Everyone else is asleep (Two are locked in their room, a third can’t walk yet, and the fourth one gave a double red blood cell donation and apparently his body overrode(?) his brain. “Okay. You, Bryan, are not in charge anymore. You are going to sleep. Now.”). It’s only–what?!11:30. I seriously was going to type 10:30. Anyway, it’s all dark because my light burned out. So here I am, the last one awake, alone in the dark, coding. I feel like Bryan.

Anyway, for one of my exercises I need to link to pictures on the web, and the pictures I want are not on the web yet, so I need to upload them. But by the time you are reading this, they are on the web.

My name is Holly.

I graduated from BYU in elementary education. Now I teach three students, my preschooler daughter and my toddling son, and my infant son. I'm passionate about motherhood, family history, and building the kingdom. Allow me to share my thoughts with you!